Dayanita Singh

Dayanita Singh's accordion-fold book-exhibition on the chairs of "tropical modernist" Geoffrey BawaI wanted to suggest a conversation among these chairs, which have always seemed to me more like people than objects, with distinct personalities and genders even." With this sentiment in mind, Dayanita Singh (born 1961) went about photographing the many chairs living throughout the houses and public buildings designed by Geoffrey Bawa, whom Singh deems a "tropical modernist" and the most influential architect of the South Asian region. Less still lifes than portraits, Singh's images show how Bawa's spaces engage with the chairs, be they designed or collected by Bawa, or installed after his passing. Made to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Bawa's birth, Bawa Chairs is constructed as an accordion-fold booklet in the manner of Singh's Chairs (2005), Sent a Letter (2007) and Museum Bhavan (2017), and intended to be unfolded and installed at will--transforming the book into an exhibition, and the reader into a curator.

A photobook archive of archives, from rarely seen collections throughout IndiaThe archive has long been an obsession for Dayanita Singh (born 1961)--both literal archives, treasuries of objects chosen with care and preserved against time, and the photobook as a moveable archive which the viewer can revisit and display at will. In Pothi Khana (Hindi for "archive room"), Singh presents photographs of India's seemingly endless private and public archives: shelf after shelf of bundles wrapped and knotted in pieces of cloth once colorful but now almost white with age. The documents within these bundles remain known only to the archivists who are curiously absent in Singh's images, their presence implied from the spaces they normally inhabit: chairs, desks, doorways, halls. Originally exhibited in 2018 at the 57th Carnegie International as a group of modular, pillarlike wooden structures whose photographs could be endlessly resequenced, Singh now transforms the mobile sensibility of Pothi Khana into this volume, which she sees as a compendium to 2013's File Room.

Both a short history and a deep dive, this is Dayanita Singh's manifesto for the photobookIs it a book, an exhibition, a catalog of the exhibition? Is it mass-produced? Is it unique? Dayanita Singh (born 1961) is a book artist who stretches the imagination of what a book can be, transcending the spaces between publishing and art. Book of Books traces the journeys of Singh's books, from the first, Zakir Hussain (1986), to her latest, Zakir Hussain Maquette (2019), showing the spectrum of her book-building process from idea to material object, and how she inventively circulates them in the art world and beyond. Taking those books she has made with Steidl as a basis, we witness the transformation of books into book-objects which open up new interpretative spaces: Museum of Chance (2014), for example, first became a book-object, then a diptych, a bookcase, a suitcase museum and a book museum, before finally becoming the ongoing museum in Singh's Museum Bhavan (2017). Book of Books documents Singh's 13 books in images and short texts, along with several DIYs Singh has created with detailed instructions on how to display her books as exhibitions--making us the curators--as well as various performative interventions, from book carts and happenings to installations and tours. At the heart of Book of Books is the collaborative process that Dayanita Singh and Gerhard Steidl have established over 20 years: the belief that a book is always in a process of becoming.

With Museum Bhavan, Dayanita Singh (born 1961) forges a new space between publishing and the museum, an experience where books have the same--if not greater--artistic value as prints hanging on a gallery wall. Consisting of 10 individual "museums" in book form, Museum Bhavan is a miniature version of Singh's eponymous traveling exhibition, with prints placed in folding expanding wooden structures. The images in Museum Bhavan have been intuitively grouped into lyrical chapters in a visual story such as "Little Ladies Museum" and "Ongoing Museum," as well as more specific series such as "Museum of Machines." As in Singh's first project, Sent a Letter (2008), the books are housed in a handmade box and fold out into accordion-like strips which the artist encourages viewers to install and curate as they wish in their own homes. The exhibition thus becomes a book, and the book an exhibition.